Future Stories

Knights of Sidonia Image: Funimation Demon Slayer: Mugen Train movie was a huge box office hit for the entertainment company and streaming service Funimation. Riding high on the success of that, the company is set to release another animated film, Knights of Sidonia: Love Woven in the Stars , based on the manga from Tsutomu Nihei. You may be familiar with Knights as two seasons are on Netflix. However, according to Deadline , Funimation has acquired the rights to the property and will begin streaming seasons one and two on its platform starting August 3. The animated film is directed by Tadahiro ‘Tady’ Yoshihira and written by Sadayuki Murai and Tetsuya Yamada, with Polygon Pictures acting as producers. The film will see a limited theatrical release in Japanese with English subtitles and an English dub, and will act as a conclusion of the series. Mitchel Berger, Funimation Global Group’s SVP of Global Commerce, spoke on his love of the series. “ Knights of Sidonia is a kick-a...

Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada has had functionally zero homeless for about six years. Japan, Singapore and Denmark also have been very successful dealing with homelessness. Singapore is a multi-ethnic society with about 6 million people. Hamilton, Canada ( a city with a population of 750,000) has also has great success reducing homelessness. Medicine Hat’s example ... Read more

Alicia Vikander in Tomb Raider Image: Warner Bros. Pictures Oscar-winning actress Alicia Vikander opens up about the status of Tomb Raider 2. When the sequel to the 2018 film was announced last fall, Vikander told Entertainment Weekly , “The plan was for us to start making one this year, of course, due to the [pandemic] situation, that’s now very different. We’re still in discussions about it, so I hope we can probably get to it next year.” In a recent interview with Collider (where the initial topic was David Lowery film The Green Knight ), Vikander discusses how not much has changed. “Pre-COVID, I would’ve said yes. And now I think it’s a yes still. It’s not greenlit, but the script is in the making. And I think everyone is excited, and I would love to revisit Lara again.” The film went through some changes as director Ben Wheatley was the original choice to helm the second Tomb Raider . However, in January 2021, Lovecraft Country showrunner Misha Green took over for Whe...

Jaws promotional image Image: Universal Pictures Bruce is the new musical from the Seattle Repertory Theater based on Jaws ’ screenwriter Carl Gottlieb’s memoir The Jaws Log . Bruce is about 26-year old director Steven Spielberg who sets out to adapt the best-selling novel, Jaws . Deadline reports, the show features music by Richard Oberacker and lyrics by Oberacker and Robert Taylor. This isn’t the duo’s first rodeo as they are the team behind the Broadway musical Bandstand , which follows military veterans upon their return from war. Bruce will be directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, who is most noted for her work at the Stratford Festival. The show was supposed to debut summer of 2021, but the pandemic put the premiere on hold. Previews of the show begin May 27, 2022, at Seattle Repertory Bagley Wright Theater, with opening night set for June 1, 2022. The show will run through June 26, 2022. Cast and creative announcements to come soon. The synopsis of Bruce is a...

Rosa Salazar in Brand New Cherry Flavor Image: Netflix Netflix dropped the official trailer for the supernatural horror limited series Brand New Cherry Flavor which premieres on the streamer August 13. The show is inspired by a novel of the same name by Todd Grimson and stars Rosa Salazar ( Alita: Battle Angel ), Manny Jacinto ( The Good Place ) , Catherine Keener ( Get Out ), and Jeff Ward ( Agents of Shield ) . Showrunners Nick Antosca (Channel Zero) and Lenore Zion ( Billions ) will also write the show. The series takes place in the 1990’s LA—Hollywood, to be specific. Filmmaker Lisa N. Nova (Salazar) is a wide-eyed young woman looking to break into the movie industry. She meets with Lou Burke, a Hollywood producer who promises to help her get the connections she needs to become a big-time director. Sh*t goes downhill when Lou betrays Lisa, and she aims to seek revenge. To do that, she asks a witch (Keener) to hex Lou and make his life a living hell. But as you know, this alwa...

Image: Hasbro, Lego, Blitzway Welcome back to Toy Aisle , io9's regular round-up of the coolest toys we’ve seen on the internet this week. We’ve got Lego heading back to The Mandalorian , old favorites heading back to Ghostbusters , some very pretty Uno cards, and Hasbro taking another crack at the “build-your-own lightsaber” toy. Check it out! Image: Lego Lego Star Wars: The Mandalorian The Armorer’s Mandalorian Forge As thrilled as we are to see The Mandalorian being spun off into other series, we’d happily trade The Book of Boba Fett for a series featuring the Armorer who not only makes short work of raw beskar, but Stormtroopers as well. The new set won’t be officially available until September 1 but you can pre-order it today for $30 which is going to be hard to resist if you’re trying to collect as many Mandalorian minifigures as you can. The 258-piece set includes not only a flaming forge and all the tools one would need to create beskar armor, but the Armorer...

Photo: Octavio Jones/Getty (Getty Images) In response to renewed concerns about the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and the spread of the delta variant , Disney is taking a major step to ensure that all of its U.S. employees are guarded against the virus. Disney’s new mandate comes just after the studio lambasted actress Scarlet Johansson for her lawsuit against the company over Black Widow in which she claims the studio shortchanged her by not giving the movie an exclusive theatrical release. In a statement sent out this afternoon, Disney announced that it is now mandating all of its salaried and non-union employees get vaccinated against covid-19 out of a desire to keep them safe as they continue to work through the pandemic. Both employees who are working on-site and those who are working remotely will be required to receive the vaccine, and going forward, the company will only be hiring those who’ve been vaccinated. “Employees who aren’t already vaccinated and are working on-sit...

Tesla’s Q2 2021 earnings call indicated there is a 3-6 month delay in the 4680 production ramp compared to their prior statements. Previously Tesla had indicated that they would have 100 GW of batteries in 2022 while now they are saying they will reach a 100 GW per year runrate by the end of 2022. ... Read more

Taika Waititi at the 2020 AACTA Awards in Sydney, Australia late last year. Photo: Brendon Thorne (Getty Images) Filmmaker Taika Waititi is involved with so many things it’s very easy to forget one or two. For example, you probably remember he’s making Thor: Love and Thunder , and he’s supposed to do a Star Wars movie . You may even know he’s a bad guy in the new Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy and produces What We Do in the Shadows , which is returning for season three . But did you remember that back in the summer of 2019 news broke that he was working on a Flash Gordon animated film? Well, it did, and today there’s an update. Collider spoke with producer John Davis, who is working on the project with Waititi, and he said the filmmaker’s vision for the film is no longer animated. “Taika is writing it,” the producer said. “It was a movie that was a huge influence on him growing up. It is one of his favorite movies. He initially said to me, ‘Let’s do it animated.’ I said, ‘Okay....

A crop of A Lesson in Vengeance ’s cover. Image: Delacorte Press It’s a known fact that we here at io9 are quite fond of stories set at   spooky boarding schools , so we’re very excited to be sharing an exclusive excerpt from Victoria Lee’s witchy new boarding school-set novel A Lesson in Vengeance , which blends queer themes with Gothic chills. Here’s a plot description to set the scene: Felicity Morrow is back at the Dalloway School to finish her senior year after the tragic death of her girlfriend. She even has her old room in Godwin House, the exclusive dormitory rumored to be haunted by the spirits of five Dalloway students—girls some say were witches. Felicity was once drawn to the dark legacy of witchcraft. She’s determined to leave that behind her now; but it’s hard when Dalloway’s occult history is everywhere. And when the new girl won’t let her forget it. It’s Ellis Haley’s first year at Dalloway. A prodigy novelist at seventeen, Ellis is eccentric and brilliant...

Black Widow is taking on her greatest opponent yet: Mickey Mouse. Photo: Marvel Like a battle in a Marvel movie, Disney and Scarlett Johansson continue to exchange punches. It all began Thursday when Johansson filed a lawsuit accusing Disney of breaching her contract for Black Widow , which guaranteed an exclusive theatrical release . Disney then replied with a statement that accused her of “ callous disregard ” to the covid-19 pandemic and revealed her salary on the film: $20 million. The haymakers have continued Friday when Johansson’s agency, Creative Artists Agency, released a statement firing back. “I want to address the Walt Disney Company’s statement that was issued in response to the lawsuit filed against them yesterday by our client Scarlett Johansson,” Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, said in a statement obtained by Variety . “They have shamelessly and falsely accused Ms. Johansson of being insensitive to the global COVID pandemic, in an attempt...

Our feelings exactly, Dynamic Duo. Photo: Fox Even if you know what to expect, watching 1966's  Batman: The Movie today is shocking. After years of being pummeled with serious, gritty, big-budget superhero spectacles , it’s hard to fathom a film as innocent and self-aware as the  one based on the popular TV show . Everyone involved is so game for silliness, so excited by the wild ideas, so absolutely aware this is complete nonsense, that the result is not just a time-capsule of another era in comic book movie history, but a reminder of why comic book movies are great in the first place. Released July 30, 1966, Batman: The Movie —directed by Leslie H. Martinson and written by Lorenzo Semple Jr.—came out between the first and second seasons of the hit TV show , which itself ran three seasons, from 1966 to 1968. I wasn’t born until 1980 so, obviously, it wasn’t something I was aware of until decades later. But growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, especially with the Tim Burton ...

The Batch find themselves severely outnumbered, if not outclassed. Image: Lucasfilm After many episodes of bounty hunting chases , Rylothi insurrection, and the briefest snifter of mounting resistance , Star Wars: The Bad Batch returned this week to a concept it fascinatingly pondered early on in its debut season. We know, as the audience, that the Clone army is destined to be replaced by the human recruits of the Stormtrooper legions. But how are they going to feel about it? Image: Lucasfilm When Bad Batch first explored this idea, we got what is arguably still by far the strongest episode of the season, “ Replacements .” There, its exploration was not the expected resistance to such a changing of the guard, but about the dark road Crosshair took himself on to prove that a clone could still be a useful weapon for the new Empire. “War Mantle” might not quite hit the same highs in telling that expected story of resistance this time around—occasionally tripping up on a few of...

Screenshot: Marvel As one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s newest heroes , the responsibility to save the world (presumably) will fall to Shang-Chi in director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings . But unlike many of Marvel’s other upcoming projects that have previously-established roots in the MCU, Shang Chi is set to introduce a slew of new characters whose lives haven’t exactly revolved around the Avengers. While Shang-Chi ’s title gives you a pretty big clue about the chunk of Marvel’s comic lore that the film explores, some of the major questions about the story have revolved around what exactly this incarnation of the Ten Rings are/is, considering that a terrorist group by the same name was previously dropped way back in Iron Man 3 . It always seemed a stretch that Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin would end up factoring into Shang-Chi in any significant way, and in a new featurette for the upcoming film, the cast explains a bit more about how Shang-C...

Screenshot: FXX Let us put away all thoughts of the “coma seasons” of Archer , which were only intermittently fun—season eight’s retro private-eye Dreamland had some good moments, but season 10's 1999 got lost in space rather quickly. Really, all they did was make us miss Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) and his Archer comrades in their element : slinging suggestively dirty jokes, merciless insults, and far too many cocktails while still managing to be mostly successful international secret agents. Season 11 saw a revived Archer likewise revive the FXX series as it returned to form; now, with a brand-new, hilarious trailer for season 12, the very adult animated series looks poised to deliver more vintage-style Archer . To which we say, bring on the PAM-PAGE! Man, that just looks so, so good. We’ve got Archer threatening a bunch of tabletop wargame players , Dirty Harry -style (“Call. Me. Knave. Again .”), the return of phrasing (with extended gestural accompaniment),...

Doctor Strange’s return is going to be stuffed to the gills with weird friends and foes. Image: Marvel Studios Get caught up for what’s coming in the season finale of the CW’s Superman & Lois , and what happens when the Legends of Tomorrow get caught up in a murder mystery... board game ? Plus, what’s next for Apple TV+ ’s See when it returns for season two. Spoilers now! Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness According to CBR , actress Yenifer Molina’s Mandy profile states she’s been cast as “Gargantos 2" in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness . In the comics, Gargantos was a cyclopean, squid-like sea monster who first appeared in Sub-Mariner #13 in 1969. Snowpiercer Snowpiercer has been renewed for a fourth season at TNT ahead of its third season premiere. Legends of Tomorrow The Legends play a murder mystery board game in Comic Book ’s synopsis for “Bored On Board Onboard.” WATCH YOUR BACK – The Legends are ready to get back home, but afte...

There is a new meme called “Cozy Futurism” which is pretending that there a choice between colonizing Mars and fixing Earth-based poverty, inequality and homelessness. I think they are basing this on the historical example of the European countries that did not colonize the Americas from 1500-1800 and solved inequality, poverty and homelessness. Oh that’s ... Read more

Who’s next? Image: Marvel Studios, Paramount, BBC, MGM, and Lucasfilm Jodie Whittaker is Doctor no more. Well, she’s actually very Doctor for the next year and a half, but with today’s shock announcement that both she and current showrunner Chris Chibnall will be departing Doctor Who by the end of 2022, we’ve come to the time-honored tradition of dreaming buck wild over who could replace her (while being completely ignorant of how the BBC, most importantly its budget, actually works). Ever since the news broke this morning, we’ve asked editors and writers at io9 and Gizmodo to come up with their own hopes and dreams for the 14th Doctor, whether they’re Doctor Who diehards (me, Jill Pantozzi) or Whovian neophytes (pretty much the rest of the staff, it’s fine, there’s too much TV to watch anyway ). What follows is our list, so, I don’t know, do what all good Doctor Who fans do—harshly judge us and get loud about it in the comments? Wunmi Mosaku Image: Marvel Studios “Oh th...